Saturday, November 3, 2012

11/3

Progress

Today I rewrote 6,163 words of DDS. Yesterday I did nothing because life got crazy and then several people crashed on my couch. So today was a makeup day. Tomorrow I'll be writing new material and that should be fun.

I consumed

I read Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater over the last few days. The problem was that I didn't know that this was the first book in a series, and it felt like I knew what was going to happen at the climax. But that climax is going to be the climax of the series, not the book, so when the climax of the book happened, I just kept reading, expecting things to happen, watching myself get closer and closer to the end and wondering how on earth this was all going to get accomplished. Then it didn't get accomplished and I was confused. For a moment I considered it as though it were a single, complete work, and I realized that I pretty much knew what would happen, and thus that was why I was waiting for it, so maybe that didn't even need to be included in the book, just hinted at.

Of course this isn't what happened, and the lesson to take away here is that I need to check if something's part of a series before I read it. Google search.

But I've been thinking about how a story might be able to get away with that. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, aside from that it really held my attention and I devoured it and now I'm looking around for what to read next from Stiefvater. It had nice multilayered characters who had really nice human interactions that actually sounded like people talking. The little details stood out for me: a sentence about the grass peeking up through the spokes in a bike on the ground, the way a car door takes multiple tries to close, little gestures that speak volumes about characterization.

There was a plot twist that I honestly didn't see coming, and that so rarely happens to me that I'm always excited and impressed when it happens.

Also, one of the main characters reminded me of a character from something else that made for some unintentional hilarity. You'd think that imagining over dramatic glitter tears would detract from the experience, but surprisingly it did not.